With news seeping out this evening that XYZ.com’s latest marketing blitz has very possibly added half a million domains to its .xyz gTLD today, I thought I’d knock out some data on the previous largest one-day growth spikes in new gTLDs.

With some caveats, which I’ll get to, I think these might be the top 10 growth days for new gTLDs.

TLD

Date

Growth (domains)

top

2016-02-16

238,616

wang

2016-03-02

175,900

bid

2016-02-18

145,330

wang

2016-03-03

137,313

xyz

2016-02-07

131,375

site

2016-02-24

120,275

xyz

2015-11-01

111,160

xn--ses554g (.网址)

2015-01-07

109,763

wang

2016-03-01

107,599

xn--ses554g (.网址)

2015-01-06

104,548

They’re the only 10 spikes of over 100,000 domains I could confirm in the DI PRO database, at least in 2012-round gTLDs.

XYZ is celebrating its second anniversary of general availability tomorrow, and has invested several million bucks in promotions on registrars which are in turn selling .xyz names for as little as a penny apiece.

As mentioned, there are some caveats to the data in the table above.

It’s based on the zone files published daily by ICANN’s Centralized Zone Data Service, which can be patchy.

CZDS is set up in such a way that each user has missing days here and there, and it has in the not too distant past had a tendency to balk when it receives an unexpectedly large zone file.

In other words, there’s a pretty good chance I’ve missed some spikes, but I’m confident there’s nothing else approaching 400,000 in a day.

UPDATE: .vip should be on the table, with a one-day spike of 115,245 on May 18 2016.

Rightside has turned down Daniel Negari’s $5 million offer to acquire four of its new gTLDs, according to Negari.

The XYZ.com CEO told DI via email tonight:

I was looking forward to operating .Army, .Dance, .Dentist, and .Vet under the XYZ umbrella. I’m disappointed that Rightside didn’t entertain my offer, especially since I believe $5MM was more than fair. I believe these and other new TLDs are worth more to me than any other registry operator due to my growing enterprise. However, it’s understandable for Rightside to want to monetize on these assets.

Rightside has told him it had reviewed the offer and was not interested, he said.

The offer was made in a March 30 open letter to the company and Securities and Exchange Commission filing and expired last night, April 7.

There was some speculation about whether it was a genuine offer, just an attempt to boost Rightside’s share price, or both.

Negari and his COO, Mike Ambrose, own about 5% of Rightside between them, following an $8.5 million investment.

Rightside’s ability to grow revenue from its new gTLD portfolio has become the focus of attention due to the intervention of activist investor J Carlo Cannell of Cannell Capital, who reckons the company is paying too much attention to rubbish TLDs at the expense of its profitable registrar businesses.

Negari thinks he would be able to grow .army, .dance, .dentist, and .vet.

The largest of those gTLDs is .vet, with about 5,200 names in its zone file. It grew by 794 names in the last 90 days.

The other three are below 3,000 names, and are either shrinking or adding fewer than 10 names per day.

XYZ.com’s second-tier portfolio strings, such as .college, .rent and .theatre, are faring a little better, at least in terms of growth. But they are a little younger, and none are over 10,000 names.